Monthly Archives: November 2012

The term church is used a lot, and it can be difficult to work out what is meant. Is it the building down the road, some giant medieval monolithic organisation or something else. Well I’ve looked at buildings already.

So today I plan to think about structure.

At a resent get together of ministers the question came up how we had all been appointed to our current role.

Now for some it was the appointment of the local congregation, and for others a central appointment, but I think we all had been appointed by the Church.

Now there is another interesting blog that looks at different types of church, Church and the Single Girl and it is well worth a read. But it got me thinking.

For some the local congregation is the church, for others the local is but part of something much wider. And I think we need to see this as both. The local congregation is the expression of church in that place, but it is expressing part of a much wider body, and expressing part of something far beyond this world – God’s Kingdom.

used to mean a social ecosystem of like-minded individuals constantly reinforcing their own world-views to the exclusion of absolutely anything that might contradict those views.

And this got me thinking about many churches, that they are often made up of the same type of person. This of course is often the people who live in the area around the church building. However then you get those who go to a church because it had “people like us” in it.

And I have to ask is this healthy? If the church is meant to be the body of Christ, and to respect and contain all parts of the body, then if it is all the same it will stop working. However I do think that this raise questions of what we mean by church {structure / building}. Is it possible to have different expressions of church that are all part of one whole working together? Also what do those outside think, is it a case of “I’m not like them so I can’t go there/won’t be welcome.”

Something that has been bouncing around in my head, what is the church for. And I’m thinking in part that it is there to stand against a dystopian world, to be a beacon of light. More to come on this topic as I sort the sermon for Sunday.